Backfence cofounder Mark Potts has done a “final word” on Backfence. The post is a good catch-all, but contains no revelations. Don’t look for much second-guessing of the company’s strategy, either – although he clearly wishes he could have ridden…
If you are looking for a great read, pick up “The Ghost Map" from Outside.in cofounder Steven Johnson. The book, published in November, poignantly tells the story of how an amateur scientist and a clergyman use their knowledge of a local…
Krillion, the retail search engine optimizer whose motto is “find national brands, locally,” is now getting 65,000 unique visitors per month and more than 200,000 page views to its appliances, the first of many planned verticals. A second vertical, still…
Tribune Interactive has added Los Angeles to its list of Metromix city guides, which also include Chicago, Orlando and Baltimore. Next week, it will add New York City as well. Eventually, Tribune aims to have the Metromix brand in all…
Backfence announced June 29 that it is shuttering its 13 community sites, which were in the D.C. area, Illinois and Northern California. The ambitious site raised an initial round of $3 million but never had high penetration in its communities…
Merchant Circle threw itself a party last week at Nola’s in Palo Alto to celebrate a year in business and registration by 140,000 small businesses. I’m on their Evite list, so I knew about it. It is probably a good…
New West is a different concept from other community sites. Started two years ago by Jonathan Weber, the former editor of The Industry Standard (the dot-com era trade bible), the seven-person site covers all of the Rocky Mountain region from…
Answering the question posed yesterday ("Where do we go from here?"), Yahoo's first move out of the gate in the post Terry Semel era was to acquire high school and collegiate sporting site Rivals.com for a rumored $100 million. This…
After being one of the first directory companies to enter the classified market, Telstra’s Sensis has put its Trading Post property up for sale. According to a report in The Age, “Sensis paid $636 million for the fading publication three years…
Some interesting details about LiveDeal's operations have been released as the result of its $11.8 million sale to YP.com, which had previously been written about by my colleague Mike Boland. During a June 7 investor call announcing the sale, LiveDeal,…
Summary Comcast has begun to serve coverage of local events on its on-demand programming menu. This includes things such as high school sports, local parades and local interest news stories. This is an interesting move for Comcast, and one that…
Here at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, an annual event for 800+ mashup developers, there’s no perspective yet on the importance of maps to the local ecosphere. But a picture is developing of a “3D Data arms race,”…
We’re all guilty of feature creep. A lot of the stuff isn’t especially useful. Now comes Palore. When it comes to directory listings, Palore believes hardly any of the info is useful. In fact, consumers want to know just one…
It’s nice when a foundation puts itself in the middle of what’s happening, and uses its money to inject a little bit of the consumer’s interest in a commercial world. It’s a win-win. Most foundations, of course, don’t actually do…
Building the perfect template for hyper-local media has been the endgame for a number of companies BackFence, American Town Networks, Pegasus News, and Citysquares, to name a few. HyperLocal Media has been working at it as well, focusing on the…
Whenever a new man moves into my community, one of the mothers in my neighborhood immediately searches the Megan's List database, which is dedicated to ID'ing sex offenders. A new site, FatDoor, however, hopes to look on the brighter side…
A lingering idea from Al Gore's Information Superhighway is using grant money to jumpstart online (and wireless) community services and involvement. One year, as a judge for the U.S. Department of Commerce, I even helped dole out some of the…
Pegasus News, the social network site based in Dallas, made a deal with Fox4 TV for a mutual content swap that would fill Pegasus' news hole, leverage its features (weather, etc.) and increase awareness about it in the community. At…
Google announced it has integrated real-time traffic reports on Google Maps. Yahoo! has had traffic reports since late 2004, and Microsoft rolled out a traffic feature (care of Traffic.com) in the May 2006 relaunch of Windows Live Local. Maps, like…
The Los Angeles Times, a great newspaper that has been widely derided for its ineffectual Web site, hopes to turn the site around by bringing in Meredith Artley as its executive editor. Artley previously served as the Web site director…
